Divided we Fall

Even during World War II it took boldness to make comedies about Jews in peril from the Nazis - Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, for instance, or Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be. These classics served a valuable function as celebrations of defiance and resilience. Postwar movies along these lines have been open to the accusation of flippancy, sentimentality and the exploitation of a tragic situation, charges levelled at the 1958 Danny Kaye comedy Me and the Colonel, Mel Brooks's 1983 remake of To Be Or Not To Be and Roberto Benigni's recent Life Is Beautiful.

Having especially disliked Benigni's film, I approached with caution Divided We Fal, a comedy set in wartime Czechoslovakia, the work of a director, Jan Hrebejk, and a screenwriter, Petr Jarchovsky, who were both still in their prams when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. I finished impressed by a film that recaptured some of the wry spirit of Jirí Menzel and Milos Forman back in the days of Dubcek and the Prague Spring.

The movie begins with a brief scene in 1937 when three men get out of a car to pee in the countryside. One of them, the chauffeur, is teased by the others. In further short sequences set over the next four years we see the Nazi annexation of the country, the Jews dispossessed and sent to camps in the East.

The trio in the opening scene are David, the son of a Jewish factory owner, and two of his father's Gentile employees - Josef, a departmental manager, and the German-Czech Horst, nicknamed 'Wurst'. In 1943 the sad, semi-crippled Josef lives with his attractive wife, Maria; the chauffeur Horst is now in the social driving seat, as a minor Nazi official; and David has escaped from a work camp in Poland, knowing that the rest of his family are dead. 'I've lived here all my life, I thought someone might help me?' he says on returning to his little native town. Instead, the first person he meets attempts to hand him over to the Nazis.

Reluctantly Josef offers David a temporary place of refuge in the secret store cupboard where he and Marie keep black market goods. Ironically the carcass of a pig has to be removed to provide room for the Jewish guest. Josef enjoys certain advantages because Horst is pursuing Marie. In order to retain this protective shield and to conceal an act of heroic kindness that could lead to his immediate execution, Josef must pretend to be a collaborator. So he has to placate the obnoxious Horst, entertain a grotesque new Nazi manager, and conceal his hostility to a jovial SS officer who commends a local doctor for the sang-froid with which he sterilises gypsies. One thing inevitably leads to several others, including the necessity for David to impregnate Marie so that a Nazi won't be billeted in their spare room.

This could have been the stuff of conventional melodrama, and there have been numerous movies about ordinary people concealing Jews in Nazi-occupied territories. But treated as black comedy the movie is both terrifyingly funny and plausible. As Eric Bentley said, farce is the other side of the coin from tragedy, because terrible things are always at stake, and the filmmakers never lose sight of the deadly consequences for all concerned. This is especially so in the climactic scenes in May 1945 when the town is liberated and old scores are being settled. Josef must clear himself or face a firing squad, and for this he needs the help of David and the pathetic Horst, as well as the self-proclaimed resistance leader who two years before tried to turn David in.

This knife-edged stuff is played straight by the whole cast and two phrases run through the picture, taking on an increasingly ironic tone. The first is Horst's constantly reiterated 'United we stand, divided we fall'. The second is his other saying: 'Who would be foolish enough now to act like a hero?' As the film concludes on an apparently optimistic note, the audience is expected to recall that a couple of years later the country will once more be subjected to mutual betrayal of neighbour by neighbour, routine humiliations, arbitrary arrests, the vindictive use of power, and that this will go on for somewhat longer than the German occupation.